A Time-Aware Approach to Early Detection of Anorexia: UNSL at eRisk 2024

Abstract: The eRisk laboratory aims to address issues related to early risk detection on the Web. In this year's edition, three tasks were proposed, where Task 2 was about early detection of signs of anorexia. Early risk detection is a problem where precision and speed are two crucial objectives. Our research group solved Task 2 by defining a CPI+DMC approach, addressing both objectives independently, and a time-aware approach, where precision and speed are considered a combined single-objective. We implemented the last approach by explicitly integrating time during the learning process, considering the ERDE{\theta} metric as the training objective. It also allowed us to incorporate temporal metrics to validate and select the optimal models. We achieved outstanding results for the ERDE50 metric and ranking-based metrics, demonstrating consistency in solving ERD problems.